Mortaljive: The Rest is Silence

There is no still point in all the Universe, and that is the rock upon which I stand

Thursday, August 22, 2013

Will that be enough?

If
you lived in a different time, would you have spoken out against women's
right to vote, or in favor--would you have remained silent, and offered
no opinion or support at all, hoping the whole thing would pass so you
could tend to your world, your chores, without such public agitations
invading your life? If you lived in an earlier time would you have
stood against human bondage, against slavery?
Would you have lifted your head from the sorrows of the self to stand
against the injustices routinely inflicted upon the poor? If young men
were sent off to kill the latest "enemy" be they Vietnamese or Cuban or
Iraqi or Mexican, would you say "No! We are the good guys, not
murderers, not mercenaries in some awful chess game between arms
merchants?" In late 1941 would you have said "Yes!" to attacking
Hitler's armies after ignoring the previous decade and all of its
antisemitism, its inhumanity, its accelerating horror? Would you have
remembered the silence of death, the silence that could have been the
sound of children playing or people shopping in the open air markets?
Are the feelings of self-righteousness enough to carry us when our ideas
have collapsed from exhaustion, including our myths: when the fables of
our origins have been used as propaganda to seal our own doom as
compliant labor, as mewling sheep, would you have cried "Enough!"?
Would you--would I--be better than our petty complaints, our trivial
insecurities, our exploited weaknesses? We are not different from those
who came before except for one thing: we are alive right now, and can
be active agents in the world. Can you bring the strength of the human
heart to something more than casting stones, something more than the
fear of loneliness, and combine it with the clarity of the rational
mind? Do you desire the wild chaos of destruction, or hold the vain
hope for something good and kind to endure on this side of the veil of
tears? All life is hopeless, but only if you see it as a zero sum game,
and it's a lot more than that, yes, no? In the day to day world is the
profound waiting to be experienced, and in the profound is the
prosaic--will you dare to be profound, even when you know it is really
nothing more than a simple and direct love of life itself? Will you
know you are already in and of the divine? Will that be enough?